Time's up for death

Sen. Gerald Cardinale (R-Bergen) warned his fellow lawmakers a couple of days ago not to rush to repeal New Jersey's death penalty statute in the coming lame-duck legislative session.
Eliminating the death penalty law during such a hurried period would be poor public policy, Cardinale claimed, adding that the issue deserves more consideration.
Perhaps the senator had just awoken from a nap of 44 years, which is how long the state has been considering what to do. And since 1963, when New Jersey last put a prisoner to death, the evidence has become incontrovertible that the state's death penalty law is a failure, morally, practically, fiscally and in any other way that thinking people might care to analyze.

Cardinale proposes a bill that would require jurors to spare a defendant's life if there is "lingering doubt" about his guilt. Another would limit state court appeals by death row inmates.
But the death penalty is beyond tweaking. The time has come for its elimination. And, although we're sure Cardinale didn't intend it, the two bills he proposes show why.
His bill to limit appeals is a direct reaction to the fact that death sentence appeals are indeed extraordinarily costly and time-consuming. Estimates by study commissions and others are that such appeals have sucked up hundreds of millions of public dollars over the last 25 years, money that could have been spent catching criminals.
But New Jersey has never seriously attempted to limit those death row appeals -- for the very reason that Cardinale felt the need to introduce his second bill.
Quite simply, the experience here and in other states shows there are very, very few death penalty cases in which jurors do not have some lingering doubt over guilt, some nagging question, some shadow of uncertainty.
And damningly, even in the rare cases in which jurors are sure they've got the right person, even in cases in which defendants have confessed, DNA technology has repeatedly worked to overturn verdicts.
No matter how confident jurors and prosecutors are, human fallibility makes it inevitable that a justice system that applies the death penalty will make fatal mistakes. That is precisely why Illinois commuted the sentences of more than 150 death row inmates a few years ago.
The many other failings of the death penalty are well known. It has not worked as a deterrent, even in states such as Texas where capital sentences have been carried out with gusto. The poor and minorities receive death sentences disproportionately. In New Jersey and many other states, the likelihood of prosecutors seeking a capital sentence varies more with the county or city where a crime occurs than with the circumstances of the killing.
Senate and Assembly leaders have committed to voting next month on ending New Jersey's death penalty. This is no rush. It is long overdue.